Books: Charles Darwin and the Mystery of Mysteries, Journal of Disappointed Man, Fordlandia, and Beak of the Finch

Charles Darwin and the Mystery of Mysteries Book Cover (left), The Journal of a Disappointed Man Cover (right)

Mystery of Mysteries

Charles Darwin and the Mystery of Mysteries by Niles Eldrege and Susan Pearson is book for kids (ages 9 and up) that does a good job of talking about who Charles Darwin was and what his life was like in England in short, easy to understand passages. It includes short vignettes with pictures of the people that were important in Darwin’s life. The title of the 2010 book comes from a phrase that Darwin wrote in his travel journal while on his famous five year sea voyage: “Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.” (see Voyage of the Beagle (Illustrated) for example).

The cast of characters in the Mystery of Mysteries are introduced as they more or less made in appearance in Darwin’s life: Robert Waring Darwin (his father), Susannah Wedgewood Darwin (his mother), Erasmus Darwin (his brother, also the name of his grandfather), mentor Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Captain Fitzroy, Joseph Hooker, Emma Wedgewood (his wife), and Annie (his daughter) to name just a few. About half of the book is spent on Darwin’s famous voyage and is a very approachable introduction to the journey.

Life’s Mysteries and the Disappointed Man

Darwin died in 1882 - toward the end of the Victorian era (1837 - 1901). A few years later, in 1889, Bruce Frederick Cummings was born and lived his adult life in the Edwardian era (1901 - 1910) and World War I era (1914 - 1918). Under the pseudonym W.N.P. Barbellion he authored the work The Journal of a Disappointed Man: An Intimate Edwardian Diary. Cummings was diagnosed with a disease today known as multiple sclerosis in 1915 and he died in 1919.

The diary is chatty, pithy, introspective, and sad. At times, it’s hard to read - as if you are eavesdropping in someone’s mind and you don’t have the complete context. Then, you get the zingers that keep you lingering, reading them over and over. Here are some that stood out to me:

“As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?”
Barbellion, W.N.P. (2011-06-01). The Journal of a Disappointed Man : An Intimate Edwardian Diary (Victorian London Ebooks) (Kindle Locations 376-378). Victorian London Ebooks. Kindle Edition.

“I have discovered I am a fly, that we are all flies, that nothing matters. It's a great load oft my life, for I don't mind being such a micro-organism — to me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe — such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour.”
(Kindle Locations 928-929)

“Life opens to me, I catch a glimpse of a vision, and the doors clang to again noiselessly. It is dark. That will be my history.”
(Kindle Locations 1038-1039)

“My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my will in the hope of winning thro' in the end. Yet at the back of my mind there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last long enough to convince others of what I might have done — had I lived. That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life — nothing more than a shadowy locum tenens, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely to disappear any moment.”
(Kindle Locations 1725-1731)

“If only I had the moral courage to play my part in life — to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming.”
(Kindle Locations 2191-2192)

“My purpose is to move about in this ramshackle, old curiosity shop of a world sampling existence. I would try everything, meddle lightly with everything.”
(Kindle Locations 2384-2385)

Fordlandia Book Cover (left), Fordlandia Album Cover (right)

Fordlandia: Disappointment in the Jungle

Speaking of sadness and disappointment, I also finished the 2010 book Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin. The book describes Henry Ford’s attempt to create a large rubber plantation in the Amazon jungle from 1928 until it was sold in 1945 by Ford’s grandson. It was a failure for many reasons and the more it failed, the more the reasons for carrying on became idealistic.

The primary goal of the plantations (there were two plantations) was to produce rubber cheaply at a time when there was a British monopoly on rubber production most of which was coming from Asia. Ironically the rubber plantations in Asia were started from seeds smuggled out of the Amazon years earlier. Cheap rubber would help Ford since cars needed tires. (In the early 1930s large scale production of synthetic rubber was years in the future, and Thomas Edison, a friend and advisor to Ford, debunked reports that appeared at the time that it was possible. A guess a light bulb didn’t go on in Edison’s head?)

The plant in question at the center of the failure of Fordlândia (in Portuguese) is the rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, which is native to South America. Growing plantation-style rubber seems like it should be possible since it was being done in Asia? From the book (Chapter 21: Bonfire of the Caterpillars) Grandin explains why that wasn’t the case at all:

“Hevea is what botanists call a climax plant, meaning that it developed in an ecosystem— in this case the Amazon— that was at the apex of its complexity. Unlike relatively new pioneer crops like wheat, corn, or rice, which grow rapidly and throw off many fertile seeds and flourish in a variety of habitats, including large plantations, Hevea is not so adaptable. Its genetic composition is as old and evolved as the jungle that surrounds it. To use a metaphor associated with human behavior, Hevea is set in its ways. It grows slowly, its girth is thick, its seeds need coaxing, and it likes to hide from predators by mixing with other jungle trees. Yet despite these survival strategies, rubber, like many other tropical plants, can be a successful commercial crop when completely removed from its home environment, freed from the pests and plagues that evolved and adapted with it. While Southeast Asia was similar enough in climate to the Amazon, its native insects, parasites, and spores ignored South American rubber and so trees could be planted in close rows. In their original context, on the other hand, rubber trees grown near one another proved susceptible to pestilence, as Weir put it, with “every change of humidity.”
Grandin, Greg (2010-04-27). Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (p. 318). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

The Benson Ford Research Center, a library and archive located at the Henry Ford, has historic images of Fordlandia.

The 2008 4AD release, Fordlandia, by the Icelandic composer and producer Jóhann Jóhannsson, was inspired by the failed Ford project. Strangely, I’ve listened to this album for years before finding out the story about Fordlandia and always found the music haunting and sad. It is interesting to have a story that goes along with it.

Evolution You Can See: Disappointed Creationists

For less time than it took for the folly of Fordlandia to become evident, and decades later, a husband and wife team methodically studied birds over twenty years and showed that you can see evolution in progress much to the disappointment of creationists. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time [1995] by Jonathan Weiner tells the story. It is a story about evolution, the Galápagos Islands, finches, and in particular the story of that husband and wife team, Rosemary and Peter Grant, and their work in the Galápagos studying those finches. I read this book after we returned from the Galápagos and many of Weiner’s descriptions of Daphne Major evoked fond memories. The Beak of the Finch is one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a long time. Weiner weaves facts and story together smoothly all the while making complex science concepts accessible to the reader.

The central idea in the book is this that we can watch evolution at work: “…that Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory. He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare not slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.” Daphne Major - the island the Grants returned to year after year - offers a perfect laboratory to study evolution of the finches (primarily Geospiza).

In the last few chapters, Weiner takes the idea of watching evolution at work and applies it to the issues of the growing resistance of insects to insecticides and bacteria to anti-bacterial drugs (The Resistance Movement) and global warming (A Partner in the Process). These are issues that all readers can surely relate to, right?

The Beak of the Finch Book Cover Front (left) and Back (right)

Binomen Art - Vitis

Vitis Spelled with Concord Grapes (left) and Concord Grapes (right)


This year we had a good harvest of our Concord grapes. We harvested about 35 pounds of grapes of which 10 pounds was made into jam.

Two weeks ago we harvested the bulk of the grapes and took the binomen-themed pictures with the genus name Vitis spelled out with grapes arranged on a leaf. Today, on a brisk fall morning, we took photos with the jam jars and yellow-brown-green leaves.

Vitis is a genus of vining plants in the family Vitaceae. Concord grapes are a cultivar derived from the grape species Vitis labrusca. V. labrusca has thick leaves with a hairy underside with brown or white hairs. The slip-skin of the Concord grape is easily separated from the pulp ball.

Vitis labrusca has the common name of “Fox grape”. At first we thought it might derive from the Aesop Fable The Fox and the Grapes. But, it seems that the common name refers to the strong smell, “candied-strawberry/musky,” of the Concord grape. The Wikipedia entry for Vitis labrusca mentions that in the 1920s scientists identified the aroma as methyl anthranilate. This compound is secreted by the musk glans of foxes and dogs apparently. So which came first, the common name or the identification of the compound? In the book General Viticulture, the following appears (2^nd Edition, page 167):

The foxy aroma of Vitis labrusca is among the most pronounced odors of grapes, and probably this fact attracted the investigators who some years ago isolated and identified the aroma substance as methyl anthranilate (Power and Chestnut, 1921). A well-matured Concord grape, ground under favorable conditions, may contain as much as 3.8 mg. of this aroma substance per liter of juice.

Quattrocchi says of Vitis etymology:

The Latin name for the grapevine, Latin vieo, -es, etum, ere “to bend, plait, weave,” Akkadian ebitu “to be tied, girt”; see Carl Linnaeus, Species Plantarum. 202. 1753 and Genera Plantarum. Ed 5. 95. 1754; Giovanni Semerano, Le origini della cultura europea. Dizionario della lingua Latina e de voci moderne. 2(2): 613, 616. Leo S. Olschki Editore, Firenze 1994.

On a side note, we learned that ampelograhy is a field of botany that deals with the identification and classification of grapevines, Vitis spp. Wikitionary gives the eytmology as deriving from the Greek ampelos for “vine” and graphē for “writing”. In older literature, the family name Vitaceae can be referred to as Ampleidaceae.

Jars of Concord Grape Jam on Colored Grape Leaves (left) and Grape Slip-Skin on Fall Leaf (right)
 

Jars of Concord Grape Jam on Colored Grape Leaves (left) and Vitis Spelled Out in Grapes (right)

Close Up of Vitis Leaf Underside Showing Brown Hairs

Binomen Art - Punica (Pomegranate)

Punica Spelled Out with Pomegranate Seeds (left), A Clump of Seeds with Arils (right)

Here we go again playing with food. It’s pomegranates this time. Pomegranates (Punica granatum) just arrived in the local grocery store as we wind down from the summer fruit and move into fall. We like to sprinkle the pomegranate seeds over muesli. Unfortunately, the seeds of these pomegranates (or more correctly, the aril of the seeds) in this post do not have the deep ruby color that we’ve seen in the past.

From Quattrocchi the origin of the generic term Punica is given as:

The Latin name, malum punica “Carthaginian apple,” Punicus, a, um, from Poenus, i “a Carthaginian,” Poenus, a, um “Punic, Carthaginian,” Poeni, orum “the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians,” Greek Phoinix “Phoenician”; see Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) (1707 - 1778), Species Planatarum. 472. 1753 and Genera Planatarum, Ed. 5. 212. 1754.

Punic refers to a group of people from Carthage in North Africa (today, Tunisia). Carthage was a Phoenician city-state founded in 814 BC. The Phoenicians came from the western, coastal part of the Fertile Crescent. The high point of Phoenician culture is said to be from 1200 - 800 BC. The Wikipedia entry for Phoenicia traces the word punicus to the term for blood red or crimson and referring to the Phoenician monopoly on the purple dye of the Murex snail.

The specific epithet, granatum, means seeded, which is self-explanatory.

Punica Spelled Out with Pomegranate Seeds and A Split Pomegranate (left), Pomegranate Seeds Removed from the Fruit (right)

Lake Wenatchee Misty Fall Day- Plants We Noticed on a Sunday Morning

View Over Lake Wenatchee Looking South

We stayed over one night at a friend’s cabin nearby the lake and on Sunday morning we had a chance to walk around and explore and identify some plants*. It’s fall and the rain has started, finally and well, thankfully this year. The leaves of the Big Leaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum) show interesting patterns in green and gold as they** prepare to drop. The smaller Vine Maples (Acer circinatum) stake out red on the color spectrum. On the edge of a drive way, we spot what we think is Blue Elderberry (Sambucus cerulea): blue dried up berries with a white bloom. Well, at least we are pretty sure of the Sambucus part. Nearby on a dirt road we spot some pine drops (Pterospora andromedea) looking very sticky. Finally, the trees around the cabin have a healthy supply of Wolf Moss (Letharia vulpina) - an almost fluorescent green dues to the vulpinic acid they contain. Cool!

* We probably said it before, but the (Revised) Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast: Washington, Oregon, British Columbia & Alaska is a good general reference to carry around.

** We use they because we always thought of the tree controlling the show, but it seems the leaves have a part to play. In a book we are currently reading, Botany for Gardeners, author Brian Capon describes it this way: “Leaf senescence, prior to abscission, includes the breakdown of chlorophyll and weakening of cell walls at the base of the petiole, in a narrow band of cells called the abscission zone. In spring and summer, auxin produced in the leaf keeps the abscission zone intact. But low night temperatures and short days in autumn cue the leaves to reduce auxin production and increase the liberation of ethylene.” The ethylene destroys the cells in the abscission zone and the leaf falls away. Who is doing what?

Big Leaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum) leaf with smaller Vine Maple leaf, red (Acer circinatum) (left), Big Leaf Maple Seeds (right)

Big Leaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum) Spotted Leaf 

Wolf Lichen (Letharia vulpina) on Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)
 

Pinedrops (Pterospora andromedea) – fall colors

Blue Elderberry (Sambucus cerulea) berries (left) and leaves (right)

Plants of the Pacific Northwest (left) and Botany for Gardeners (right)

Weller Louwelsa Vase with Rudbeckia nitida

Weller Louwelsa Vase with Rudbeckia Flowers


In this pots and plants post, we have paired a Weller Louwelsa vase and Rudbeckia nitida - Gloriosa Daisy ‘Herbstonne’.

The Weller Pottery Company created a wide-range of designs, from art ware to functional ware from the 1870s to the 1940s. This vase is a from the Louwelsa line and is brown-glazed with hand painted roses (it looks like) in reds and golds. According to Warman’s Weller Potter: Identification and Price Guide Louwelsa was produced from 1896 to 1924. Other sources state that the Louwelsa line was one of the most popular Weller lines. This vase is 9.5” tall with the artist mark “Burgess” (for Levi Burgess) on the side and the Weller die-impressed mark and 314 on the bottom. The Weller mark is a half circle seal trademark which Weller used between 1896 and the early 1900s.

Inside the vase we put Rudbeckia nitida Gloriosa Daisy 'Herbstsonne', sometimes commonly called Shining Coneflower due to the prominent green cone. Rudbeckia are a genus in the family Asteraceae (Compositae) popular for their bright yellow and orange flowers. Rudbeckia liven up our tired garden as August slips into September. The bright flowers channel memories of the sun, as the days get noticeably shorter.

Flowers in the in the Asteraceae family are composite flower heads with either ray florets, disc florets, or both. A floret is a small flower in a composite flower head. The R. nitida has both ray florets (the yellow “petals” - they aren’t really) and discs (small flowers in the cone). A close up of the cone shows each the fused petals forming a tube. For other examples of flowers from the Asteraceae family see Wildflowers-and-Weeds.com by the author of the Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification (a very handy book).

The “cones” of this Rudbeckia are particularly prominent by themselves, but even more so because the ray florets point downward. We grow R. nitida on the north side our our property in a narrow section of yard between a fence and a garage. It’s a spot that gets only a few hours of good sun, not enough in our opinion for optimal growth of the plant. Despite less the less than optimal conditions, this coneflower easily reaches grows to 7 feet, blooming from July to September.

So where does the binomial name come from? Dave’s Garden says the generic name is for Olof Rudbeck and his son (also Olof), 17^th Swedish botanists and the specific epithet nitida means shiny or glossy. Quattrocchi, doesn’t spare the details and gives us this generic name origin:

After the Swedish botanist Olaus (Olof) Olai Rudbeck (Rudbeckius), 1660 - 1740, physician, M.D. Utrecht 1690, professor of anatomy and botany, traveler, teacher of Linnaeus, author of De fundamentali plantarum notitia. Trajecti ad Rhenum [Utrecht] 1790. He was father of the Swedish naturalist scientist Johan Olof Rudbeck (1711 - 1790); according to Stearn the name also commemorates the Swedish physician and botanist Olaus (Olof) Johannis Rudbeck (1630 - 1702, b. Vasteras, d. Uppsala), father of O.O. Rudbeck; see J.H. Barnhart Biographical Notes upon Botanists.

Weller Louwelsa Vase with Flowers (left) and Artist Mark “Burgess” (right)
 

The cone of Rudbeckia nitida with disc forets viewed with a Peak Scale Lupe 10x 

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - Visitor Center

Every person deserves the chance to live a health, productive life.
Arrive curious. Leave inspired.

These are statements from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Visitor Center. The visitor center is a place where you can find out about the history, work, and mission of the foundation. I was walking by the other day and stumbled on the visitor center. If you are in the area (downtown Seattle and in particular near the Space Needle), it is worth a stop. If you can’t make it to the visitor center, you can try the audio tour using your phone and the map shown below which gives a good overview or visit their website.

The visitor center is laid out linearly with four big spaces: voices, family & foundation, partnerships, and innovation & inspiration. The four spaces build up naturally so that in the last space (innovation & inspiration) you, the visitor, are asked to solve problems and provide ideas that could make a difference. This is where the image at the top of this post came from.

The visitor center is an interesting fusion of technology and natural materials - mainly wood. When you push a lever, move a roller, or push a button to activate or change a display, you are usually touching a soft, friendly wood object. After a few moments, the change you made is reversed and quietly the display goes back to its previous state, ready for the next visitor. There is a picture below of a lever that controls two videos. When no one is controlling the video, the lever moves slowly between the two videos. At any time you can take hold of it and slide it around. Another picture shows blocks with dates (fact blocks) that you push to rotate and see facts on the other side. After a few seconds, the blocks turn themselves back around.

The Reinvent the Toilet Fair took place August 15 and there were a couple of interesting artifacts left over from that including The Earth Auger Toilet: Innovation in waterless sanitation (el taladro de la tierra) and samples of Black Soldier Fly (BSF) larvae that are used in another toilet design. The BSF are “voracious eaters of faecal waste and as pre-pupae can be turned into revenue-generating products like animal feed and biofuels.”

After an hour plus of reading, walking, and interacting with the displays, one question kept coming up in my mind and it is this: how is it that we have the situation where we need something like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its unprecedented money and scope to solve these problems? Has something gone wrong? Is this the natural state of human society?

I think the question is interesting for the following reasons. Chances are that you and I will never amass the wealth that has enabled the foundation to undertake its mission. This is not sour grapes, but is stating the obvious. Given this, what is it that you and I can do in our everyday lives? To this end, there is in the visitor center what I’ll call a pledge tree (see photo) where visitors commit to taking action. But, beyond this pledge tree and more importantly, what is it that you and I could do as a citizen when it comes to voting for systems of governance and law? What things should we be weary of that cause problems that we end up having to solve later? As a consumer, what habits do we have that, again, cause problems we have to solve later – be they local or in some other country? That is the essence of the question that was in my mind as I left the visitor center. Is this something the visitor center should discuss? Perhaps not. This kind of “education” is hard, doesn’t have any easy answers, and is controversial to boot. (I did not search extensively on the foundation’s website to see if these issues are covered in there; I am only commenting that I did not see these issues covered in the visitor center.)

Arrive Currious. Leave Inspired.

Gates Foundation Visitor Center – Two Displays

Gates Foundation Audio Tour Brochure

Gates Foundation Visitor Center Brochure

Pledge Tree – What Can You Do? 

Bus Stop Biosphere

The photos in the post are objects I’ve seen going back and forth to the bus stop in the last few months. The bus stop means work; my mind wanders to anything but work as I walk. In particular, when I walk in the city I instinctively look for nature amidst the paved spaces. And, I find it.

Bus Stop Biosphere II >

Find 1: One morning as I was walking to the bus stop, I saw this dead bird - a female house sparrow (Passer domesticus) I believe. Then again it could be a female house finch (Carpodacus mexicanus). I didn’t think to take the critical measurements: wing chord, tarsus, or culmen.

Find 2: On the way from the bus stop on a Saturday (unusual because I rarely take the bus on Saturdays), I found another dead bird, this time I think a male house finch judging by it’s rosy breast. Did I take those critical measurements? No, but I composed a small Still Life with a rotting pear from our tree, and some flowers (clover and poppy) growing on the side of the neighbor’s garage.

Find 3: Near a bus stop for the 5 bus, there is a patch of burdock (Arctium minus) where I like to watch the bees collecting pollen.

Find 4: Leaving the house for work one morning, I popped out on to our deck and saw this Brachyscome flower (one we’ve had for a few years now) and it’s variegated petals.

Find 5: Just a minute away from my high rise dungeon (the office), I spotted this dragonfly, motionless, but alive on the sidewalk.

Find 6: Just out of our back door I composed this arrangement of a rock, robin’s shell, and borage flower and leaves. And, then off to work.

Fin 7: Near a bus stop for the 5 bus, there also grows some Asteraceae flowers. Daisy or aster? Next time I need to examine the involucral bracts to help decide.

Find 8: A rock rose (family Cistaceae) grows on a sloping hillside near the bus stop.

Find 9: Rumex plans from the Polygonaceae family grows here and there on a median strip near the bus stop. Is it dock or sorrel I wonder as the bus approaches.
 

Walking in the back gate from a long day at work, I saw this banana slug (Ariolimax) without a care in the world. To be or not to be a banana slug?


A bit of alfalfa (Medicago sativa) in the median strip: city hay?